The English Rogue: Continued in the Life of Meriton Latroon, and Other Extravagants: The Fourth PartHead, Richard
General
The English Rogue: Continued in the Life of Meriton Latroon, and Other Extravagants: The Fourth Part
Head, Richard
Rogues and vagabonds -- England -- Fiction
_Although I have not the Honour to be acquainted with you, Great Sir, in
whose Person dwells (as I hear) all the Virtue and Valour of slain_
English Heroes, _by a Transmigration; yet I am not unknown to the_
African _part of the Macrocosme, where my single Sword hath eaten its
way through thousands, and hath afterwards drank it self into a surfeit,
with the blood of those Hell-dyed Infidels. My forward valour soon
rewarded my unknown Worth, and for no other reason, than I thought fit
to command the Destinies, having so great a power over Life and Death, I
was made a Captain. At first, the great care I had to preserve my own,
made me expose my self as their Target, to guard them from their enemies
Arrows, so that in one Battel, (wherein there was threescore thousand
men of the adverse party, there was but three hundred of them escap’d
with life to inform their friends of their Countreys loss,) I say, in
that barbarous conflict I return’d home, as thick stuck with Arrows, as
a porcupine with Quills; afterwards my Name served to fright the Rogues,
without fighting a stroak. But the long absence from my own Countrey,
possest me with so great a desire of seeing that blessed Soil, that gave
me breath, I resolved to acquit my Command, and happy in this
opportunity of tendring my Person and Services at the feet of a Soul so
magnanimous as your self._
Having finished his Formal bumbastical hyperbolical Speech, the Governor
was at a stand, what to do with this mighty _Garagantua_, having almost
disenabled his tongue from speaking, by biting it e’ne through, to
contein himself from laughing out right; but considering with himself,
promised him at last, that he would Muster him in his own Company for
the present, till he could find out something more suitable to his worth
and quality, and for the present gave him some Money, which our Captain,
getting drunk with all that night in the Company of some Officers into
which he had intruded himself, and taking the liberty of undervaluing
some of them in his prodigious cracking, was soundly kick’t for all his
lame hand. But such was the Fortune of War, that our Captain had not
trailed a Pike above a Month, before he stole a Chamber-Pot, two
Quart-pots, Flaggons, with some other Pewter, and sold them at another
Ale-house in the Town; with the Money he got drunk, and coming home to
his Quarters, his Landlady taxing him with the Theft, made no more ado,
but first abusing him in all the most opprobrius terms that a Whore
could invent, that had served three seven years Apprentiships to a
_Billingsgate_ Fish-woman, he then manfully beat her, and in that
manner, that she was forc’d to cry out Murder. Neighbours coming in,
seiz’d my valiant Captain, and in that pickle he was in, carried him
before the Governour, who on seeing him in that drunken condition, sent
him to the Mainguard, where he lay all that night as round as a Ball.
The next Morning he was tryed by a Council of War, and finding him a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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